THE DEFENDERS
In January 2020, Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft announced that the $143-billion IT giant targets to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits by 2030, and by 2050 it hopes to have taken out enough to account for all the direct emissions the company has ever made since it was founded in 1975. Anand Mahindra tweeted “bravo @ satyanadella … You have raised the bar for us all.” It is all the more relevant since the Mahindra group had already announced plans to be carbon neutral by 2040, a decade ahead of the deadline set by the UN’s Climate Ambition Alliance.
Aligning India’s commitment to the Paris Agreement, corporate houses, including Tatas, Reliance Industries (RIL), Aditya Birla Group, Mahindras, ITC, Larsen and Toubro, Adani, JSW, Essar, Vedanta, ACC, Dalmia and Ambuja, have mapped their future course of action to achieve ‘net-zero emission’ by cutting down on greenhouse gases (GHG) such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases from factories and end-products. That’s important since India is the world’s third-largest emitter of GHG and accounts for 2.46 billion metric tonnes, or 6.8 per cent, of global emissions. Since the country relies on coal-based power plants to generate electricity, it was the highest contributor to household carbon footprints — from 26 per cent in low-expenditure households to 36 per cent among the rich.
“Against the backdrop of multiple competing interests is the one unifying truth which is that, we all share this planet and will collectively drive it to its rescue or doom,” Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman, Aditya Birla Group, wrote in a personal LinkedIn blogpost
